Sunday, April 14, 2013

I have previously encouraged people to read Randall Collins’ work (his
infrequently updated blog, The Sociological Eye, is typically
excellent), but it is only recently that I tackled his book on interaction
rituals. And despite its forbidding title, seemingly promising a work on some
technical topic in the sociology of religion, this is a very good book that
deserves to be more widely read, especially beyond the disciplinary confines of
sociology. (The title is in part a reference to Erving Goffman’s Interaction Ritual; but while “Interaction
Ritual” is a great title, easily bringing to mind the rituals of everyday life
with which Goffmann is principally concerned, the addition of chains makes the topic of Collins’
book a bit obscure, even if the idea is clearly explained in the work itself).

The book presents an ambitious theory of social action based
on rituals and the emotions they amplify – so ambitious, in fact, that it is
likely to seem absurd at the margins, much like rational choice theory sounds
absurd to most people when pushed to extremes. Skimming the reviews of the book
in sociology journals one finds a mixture of admiration and annoyance at the
scope of the book’s claims, combined with a desire to put the theory in its
place: interaction ritual chain theory cannot
explain this or that phenomenon, or it exaggerates the importance of
interaction rituals at the expense of meaningful communication or strategic
action. But I tend to prefer theories that are ambitious and fruitful even if ultimately
wrong, so I will not dwell overmuch on the book’s shortcomings here.

The basic ideas of the theory are deceptively simple, drawn
more or less in equal parts from Durkheim, Goffman, and Mead. Collins
starts with the idea of a situation of co-presence, or really any physical
gathering. A situation of that sort turns into a ritual when those physically present focus their attention on
specific people, objects, or symbols, and are thereby constituted as a distinct
group with more or less clear
boundaries. This obviously includes religious rituals, but also a vast number
of interpersonal interactions, ranging from informal small-group conversations
and sexual acts at one end to academic lectures, workplace meetings, conference
presentations, political rallies, sports events, and other large-scale physical
gatherings with a joint focus at the other end of the scale. With a bit of
conceptual stretching one can even include here private rituals (e.g., praying alone, having a solitary cigarette
or a cup of coffee before working or after working), with only one participant (these are treated by Collins as secondary rituals, where the focus of attention
is on the symbols and objects whose meaning and value is produced in primary social
rituals); and one may also wish to treat situations of joint focus but no physical co-presence – mediated
interactions, in short – as rituals (though Collins claims, for reasons
that will become clear below, that rituals without physical co-presence are far
less likely to succeed qua rituals).
As should be obvious, the word “ritual” is here being used in a very capacious
sense, without reference to the “ceremonial” aspects of many of the activities
that we would normally call rituals, or to any hard and fast distinction
between the “sacred” and the “profane;” Collins stresses that he wants us to
see ritual “almost everywhere” (p. 15). I have no particular problems with
this; “ritual”, like “game”, is a family resemblance
term. The more interesting move comes when we ask what a ritual is for.

A ritual, for Collins, is basically an amplifier of emotion.
(I pause to note that an amplifier of
emotion is not necessarily a generator of
emotion, though it is not clear whether or not Collins sees any important
distinction here). We are literally “pumped up” by a successful ritual – we
experience a buzz, exhilaration, enthousiasmos, “collective
effervescence.” A great lecture, a sports spectacle in a vast stadium, a
great concert, a fire-and-brimstone sermon, the rituals of solidarity among
small military units; these interactions motivate
us, that is, they set us in motion, send us on our way to act beyond the
immediate confines of the group situation (to read the book discussed in the
lecture, follow the news of your sports team or music band and wear the team colors,
proselytize for your sect, attack the enemy, and perhaps also to do the crappy
jobs necessary to gather the material resources to do all of these things). Not
every ritual is successful, of course (and not every ritual is equally successful forall participants, even when the ritual is generally successful – more on this
point later); some ritual situations bore us, sending our attention wandering,
and we end up feeling drained and depressed: think of a boring meeting at your
workplace, or an awful lecture:

These rituals are
demotivating; as Collins puts it, they sap our “emotional energy.”

Emotional energy (EE) is the all-purpose term Collins uses
to talk about the emotions and moods that motivate (anger, righteousness, joy,
pride, etc.) or demotivate us (depression, sadness, etc.). A successful ritual
generates and amplifies motivating emotions, while an unsuccessful ritual does
the contrary. Perhaps Collins’ most controversial claim is the idea that we are
basically EE “seekers”: much (all?) of our social activity can be understood as
a largely unconscious “flow” along the gradient of maximal EE charge for us, given our particular material
resources and positions within the “market” for ritual situations (the set of
ritual situations available to us). Our primary “motivation” is the search for
motivation; or more precisely, motivation (our “motive power”) is simply a
result of emotional amplification in ritual situations, so that we are
propelled along “chains” of situations where we achieve high levels of EE and
avoid situation chains where the contrary is the case. Thus, our ordinary
“interests” cannot
be understood apart from the ritual situations which shape and indeed
construct them as genuinely motivating values; whether a person cares
specifically for material goods, knowledge, or the welfare of some particular
group depends on the ritual chains in which they participate and the way these
rituals affect their emotional energy. As Collins puts it, “[h]uman behaviour
may be characterized as emotional energy tropism. Social sources of EE directly
energize behaviour; the strongest energizing situation exerts the strongest
pull” (pp. 181-182; he adds that “individuals do not experience such situations
as controlling them; because they are being filled with energy, the feel that
they [are in] control … When EE is strong, they see immediately what they want
to do.”).

In keeping with the “energy” metaphor, Collins argues further
that rituals charge symbols, objects,
and persons with value (or, in the case of unsuccessful rituals, drain them of
value) that then circulate in other rituals (in “chains” of interaction
rituals) and in “private” settings (in secondary rituals). Consider a powerful
symbol for some group, like the cross. Its power as a symbol – its
concentration of meaning and value, and thus its ability to motivate action – is
directly related to the success of the rituals in which it is a central focus
of attention (church services, prayer rituals, etc.); and it is more powerful
for those who participate in these rituals regularly and who are themselves
closer to the focus of attention. For these people, the cross becomes an
increasingly powerful reminder of their bonds to one another, a genuinely
“sacred” object whose violation can engender anger and around which other norms
(prescribing forms of display, handling, material sacrifices, etc.) can also develop. At the same time, the cross obviously does
not have the same motivating power for everyone (certainly not for every
nominal Christian); its ability to awaken emotional reactions in people outside
the ritual situation depends on how it circulates in the various “ritual
chains” of people’s lives (whether it is something worn, referred to,
exchanged, displayed in painting or art, etc.), and it decays with distance to
the rituals that imbue the cross with value.

Thus, once an object or an idea (a “symbol” for short) is
“charged” by rituals, it can serve to temporarily reinforce the identities of
group members and motivate them to act in accordance with what they take to be
the group’s values (defending the symbols that are central to the group’s
rituals, for example), even when the group is not gathered together. By the
same token, symbols will be inert for
those who do not participate in the rituals that invest them with value and
meaning; the value and meaning (or more precisely, the motivational potential)
of any symbol is always relative to
particular groups and their rituals. And, crucially, anything can become a powerful symbol for some group, given a
sufficiently successful ritual: a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics or Marx’s Capital,
particular places or animals, the image of a person like Hugo Chávez (a
charismatic person being simply a person who has been charged with emotional
energy in interaction rituals, though we can also think of people who are
especially skilled at producing successful interaction rituals), the expression
of particular opinions (e.g., the idea that global warming is a hoax or that shape-shifting lizards rule the
world); the key point is that these objects and symbols both reinforce the bonds
between group members and store reserves of motivation that people can draw on
outside the immediate context of the ritual.

Stated more incautiously than I think Collins would, rituals
are what I would call engines of sacrality: they produce sacred things the way a generator might charge a battery. There
is no room in the theory for a distinction in kind between the sacred and the
profane; a sufficiently powerful ritual can make anything that is a joint focus
of attention into a sacred object, its sacrality merely the measure of its
emotional charge for a particular group. And because rituals are omnipresent in
human life, sacred objects and symbols are also omnipresent. (From this point
of view, the idea that the modern world is especially “disenchanted” is
basically a myth, though I suppose it is possible that rituals in the modern
world are more “fragmented” – there are a multiplicity of symbols that become
charged with emotional energy and value rather than a relatively small set of
such symbols, including the symbol “god”). Or, as the South Indian poet Bavasanna
once put it (as
quoted by David Shulman):

The pot is a god. The
winnowing fan is a god. The stone in the street is a god. The comb is
a god. The bowstring is also a god. The bushel is a god and
the spouted cup is a god.

Gods, gods, there are so
many there’s no place left for a foot.

Though Collins does not say this, this view implies that ritual
is prior to belief: belief “in” a cause, or a leader, or a god, or anything of
the sort is primarily attachment to particular symbols of group membership that
have been charged with value by powerful rituals, and should tend to decay in
the absence of rituals “recharging” these symbols. (Collins suggests that a
week is a good estimate of the half-life of the emotional charge of most
symbols; hence the weekly services of churches or the weekly frequency of many
intimate rituals, for example). Moreover, motivated reasoning should be
ubiquitous, as indeed it seems to
be; for the most part, we do not reasonour way to most of our important
beliefs, but acquire these through participation in communities with their
interaction rituals (which may not look like
obvious rituals; note that as long as we are participants in a successful
interaction ritual, our focus is on the things the ritual is about, not on the
ritual itself). Sociologists time and again find that many (most?) people join
social movements before they acquire
clear beliefs about issues; we then justify these beliefs ex post and defend them against perceived
threats. And when a particular belief becomes entangled
with an identity – when it becomes, in other words, a focus in some chain
of successful interaction rituals, circulating as a marker of membership in
some group– it then becomes more or less immune to rational argument. This is
not to say that we cannot on occasion reason our way to various positions; but
solid “belief” (in the sense that people most people have in mind when they say
that they believe “in” something, ranging from Christianity to socialism) needs
a lot of help from interaction ritual chains (understood as repeated, focused
interactions that charge certain symbols with value). Belief without ritual and
community is typically a fickle thing, discarded just as easily as acquired.

But how do
successful rituals manage to amplify emotion and produce sacred objects and
symbols? Here Collins draws a picture of human beings as homo saltans. Emotional charge or motivational energy is built up
from entrainment: the
micro-coordination of gesture, voice, and attention in rhythmic activity, down
to tiny fractions of a second. Think of how in an engrossing conversation the
partners are wholly attuned to one another, laughing and exhibiting emotional
reactions simultaneously, keeping eye contact, taking turns at precisely the
right moments, mirroring each other’s reactions; or how a sports event, a
sermon, or a concert produces emotional energy through the rhythmic
synchronization of the fans or congregants in call and response, or simply in dance.
Or consider sexual acts, to which Collins devotes a long and very interesting
chapter. Emotional amplification works everywhere through physical resonance; as we become progressively attuned to the physical activity of
others, individual emotions (which are, after all, rooted in physical
dispositions) come to be shared and amplified. (Consider the difference between
listening to a recording of comedian in the privacy of one’s own room and
listening to a comedian live while in a room of people laughing; or the fact
that one
can feel the need to crywhen
one is surrounded by people crying).

(We might even say that patterns of micro-coordination are
the building blocks of macro-coordination: the larger circuits of collective
action are nourished by the smaller-scale rituals of collective micro-activity.
Though we are not there yet; we have not yet seen how to translate the
micro-coordination characteristic of successful rituals to the patterns of macro-coordination
that produces what we normally call power).

Reading these parts of Collins’ book on how successful
rituals depend on high levels of emotional entrainment brought to mind some
very old passages from Plato, who among the great philosophers is perhaps the
one most keenly aware of the significance and power of ritual in this sense.
Plato’s entire theory of education, for example, is premised on the idea that successful
character formation depends on ritual chains that focus attention on the right
sorts of symbols and are built up from precise attention to rhythmic elements; character education is inseparable from
participation in “musical” rituals, and lack of participation – or the
inability to become fully attuned to the rhythms of these rituals – can
therefore weaken character. We are situational beings, requiring constant
reinforcement of our character through ritual. As the Athenian Stranger in the Laws puts it, using rather more elevated
language:

these forms of child-training,
which consist in right discipline in pleasures and pains, grow slack and
weakened to a great extent in the course of men's lives; so the gods, in pity
for the human race thus born to misery, have ordained the feasts of
thanksgiving as periods of respite from their troubles; and they have granted
them as companions in their feasts the Muses and Apollo the master of music,
and Dionysus, that they may at least set right again their modes of discipline
by associating in their feasts with gods. … [A]lmost without exception, every
young creature is incapable of keeping either its body or its tongue quiet,
[653e] and is always striving to move and to cry, leaping and skipping and
delighting in dances and games, and uttering, also, noises of every
description. Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of
the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and
harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows
in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony,
whereby they cause us to move [654a] and lead our choirs, linking us one with
another by means of songs and dances; and to the choir they have given its name
from the “joy” [chara] implanted
therein. (653c-654a,
Bury translation, slightly modified).

Or, as Collins puts it, more prosaically, “[i]n general,
“personality” traits are just these results of experiencing particular kinds of
IR chains.”

Collins follows four basically theoretical chapters (describing
the interaction ritual model of social action and providing evidence of how
rituals amplify and generate emotion) with five more applied chapters: on
“private” thinking and its sources in interaction rituals (technically this is
a “theory” chapter, though it felt more like one of the applied chapters), sex
and the generation of sexuality in interaction rituals, situational
stratification (class, status, and power), tobacco rituals and anti-rituals
(which provoked at least one
outraged response arguing that Collins is basically an apologist for
tobacco companies), and a chapter on the production of “individualism” in the
modern world. Not all chapters are equally successful (I liked the tobacco and
situational stratification chapters best); and though Collins’ range of
scholarship is wide, there is a tendency to look primarily to evidence from the
USA and Britain and universalize it rather too quickly.

Rather than describe in detail these specific applications
of the theory (though more on “power” in a minute), let me instead speculate a
bit on how one might use these ideas to think about politics. Here are a number
of potential topics that seem like they could benefit this framework, in
descending order of epistemic certainty (later topics I’m less sure about).

Cults of personality. I’ve mentioned before
that I think cults of personality emerge from interaction rituals. Not all of
these interaction rituals will be successful, but it is enough if some of them do produce true believers – people for
whom the leader is a sacred object (hardcore Chavistas, Red Guards, etc.) who
can then act as norm enforcers and provide a core of supporters enhancing the
mobilization of emotion in various settings. Collins’ theory also suggests
that, as in many “power rituals”, the “frontstage” performance of worship does not imply anything much about behaviour
outside of the ritual context (“backstage”), especially for those people who
are at the margins of the ritual and are not energized by its performance. (The
world is full of people who feign
compliance and drag their feet, in Collins’ presentation). Indeed, the theory
tells us precisely where to look for
“preference falsification”: among marginal participants in forced rituals,
especially low-status group members for whom the ritual is draining rather than
motivating, and who derive their sources of motivation from other rituals
(e.g., private “niches” of deep friendship in socialist countries before 1989,
church services and other intense ritual situations, etc.)

More interestingly, I take it that the
theory points to what we might call the “social construction of charisma.”
Charisma for the most part does not precede
successful rituals, but is built up by them. The charismatic leader is the
person who both becomes emotionally energized by being the focus of attention
in successful rituals, and is in turn charged as a sacred object by ritual
participants. Thus, though some people will of course be more skillful than
others at using ritual situations to amplify collective emotion (and hence will
be more likely to be considered “charismatic” leaders), the mere fact that someone can compel attention
may often be sufficient to produce an aura of charisma, especially if the
rituals are otherwise successful (one thinks here of in retrospect fairly uncharismatic leaders like Stalin or Kim
Jong-il). I suspect that more skilful producers of charisma are precisely the
people who seem to have the knack for putting together already charged symbols produced
in everyday interaction rituals into larger narratives and symbols leading to them; Chávez was a master of this art,
effortlessly associating himself with “the people.” (By contrast, his chosen
successor, Maduro, is not yet a sacred object, charged in an endless series of
interaction rituals, since he has not yet been the focus of attention for long in successful interaction rituals; this appears as a lack of charisma, though it could yet change).

The mobilization of social movements. Along the
same lines, we could understand the way in which social movements are built up
in terms of chains of interaction rituals (Collins himself describes one case
by looking at growth of social movements against tobacco). Movements grow as
charged symbols come to link a larger set of groups whose rituals for the
production of solidarity (WUNC
displays, to use the terminology of the late Charles Tilly) are
sufficiently compatible. (I think also here of Ernesto Laclau’s ideas
about how the “people” in populism – its
master symbol – is constituted by linked “chains of demands” – charged symbols
that circulate among and link otherwise disparate groups).

The lens of ritual also
emphasizes the tremendous importance of physical
mobilization; ritual is far more powerful when people are physically together
and aware of each other’s reactions. Movements that depend on “social” media
can hardly match the power of movements that are forged in physical
co-presence. Marches, campaign rallies, etc. are not important because they
provide information, or even because they are costly signals of commitment
(though they are sometimes that) but because they concentrate and amplify
emotion, motivating people to keep going in sometimes quite difficult
circumstances. (You don’t go to a campaign rally to learn a candidate’s
position, but to show solidarity and renew your commitment to a cause or a
person).

More generally, the lens of
ritual provides a way of thinking about power as the capacity to mobilize or disrupt collective action
rather than as the capacity to enforce orders in micro-situations or to produce
calculable consequences in the world. Power in this sense is produced in
micro-rituals of solidarity and cemented by strong emotional experiences that
circulate in the form of charged symbols (like common experiences of war; hence
the
strength of political parties forged in warfare as against parties held
together only by patronage). Collins mostly discusses power in terms of
deference rituals or the ability to produce calculable consequences, but the
theory he offers can provide resources for thinking about the sources of
collective action more generally.

The (relative) insignificance of ideology. Taken
in its strongest terms, Collins’ theory seems to suggest that ideology is generally
unimportant. Whether a symbol acquires socially motivating value depends much
less on its “generalized” meaning than on its place within chains of
interaction rituals; we are not generally the dupes of rhetorical framings and
persuasive strategies except in the
context of successful ritual situations. (Collins notes, for example, that most
advertisement seems to be unsuccessful at actually persuading people to buy
products, and is mostly intended to preserve attention space against
competitors). From this perspective, the decline of labor movements worldwide,
for example, may owe less to any ideological
changes (“persuasion” and “manipulation” taken in a very broad sense) than to (intentional
or unintentional) changes in the conditions for the ritual production of
solidarity. Chris Bertram recently
mused on the occasion of Margaret Thatcher’s death that UK society used to
be socially more class-differentiated (there were strong institutions where
class solidarities and roles were produced) but is now less so (since these
institutions have vanished), despite very low levels of economic mobility and
higher levels of economic inequality; many people now “feel” that there is more
equality. From the interaction ritual perspective, these changes are not the
result of the working class becoming simply convinced of lies due to clever
persuasive strategies by elites, but of the less central place of rituals and
symbols reinforcing class solidarity in their lives. This is in turn due to any
number of causes: laws that made labor unions more difficult to organize,
structural changes in employment patterns, the decay of rituals of deference,
the emergence of rituals focused on celebrities that cut across social class,
etc.

The (near) impossibility of deliberative
democracy. I confess that the interaction ritual perspective makes me feel
pessimistic about the prospects for anything like genuinely deliberative democracy.
Deliberation is itself a ritual situation, but one that seems particularly
fragile and unlikely to produce strong commitments, unlike many other political
rituals, since it is premised on disagreement. The basic building blocks of
political solidarity – all the rituals inadvertently sacralising various
opinions as tokens of membership – seem to cut against the possibility of
successful deliberation except in very rare circumstances. But this is
something I would need to think more about.

The ritual origins of civilization. From reading
Peter Watson's “The
Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New” I take
it that the conventional wisdom in anthropology today seems to be that
“civilization” (or perhaps better, cities) did not emerge from agriculture; the first cities are ritual centers, and precede the development of agriculture. Though
this idea (including the fact that much early religious practice seems to have also depended on the chemical amplification of experience through hallucinogens) seems to fit within the overall perspective of the theory, I don’t quite know what to make of it yet.

All in all, for me this was one of those books that changes the way I see things; everyday situations – a committee meeting, a lecture, a
political event – suddenly appeared in a new light, and even everyday problems
– habit formation, how to give an interesting talk, etc. – seemed to benefit
from the insights Collins' perspective provides.

"The basic building blocks of political solidarity – all the rituals inadvertently sacralising various opinions as tokens of membership – seem to cut against the possibility of successful deliberation except in very rare circumstances. But this is something I would need to think more about."

Token opinion do come from somewhere. Perhaps the prominence of deliberation may not be as high as some of us would like but debate, inquiry are as you suggest rituals in themselves and I would venture to guess that there are too many whose identity and economic well being is determined by these rituals to say that it need be absent.

"Oppressed groups tell themselves epic narratives of their history, elaborate their solidarity in song and ritual, fashion collective symbols of their common endeavor" (Eagleton, 191-2). This is not "mental befuddlement." It is all designed to "foster solidarity and self-affirmation" (Ibid, 192). This will make it possible for the group to achieve some political ideal.

That was indeed an interesting read. I am however still confused about some of his definitions. What does he really mean by interactional ritual chains? It seems as if he connects different parts in a single ritual - but he doesn't explaint how different interactions are connected? And how they organize a community. For example.. If a boy gets integrated into adult society - he might in a cultural christian context get a confirmation. This ritual, however seems to bee split and organized by different ritual.. he has to get prepared for the confirmation, so he gets teached by a priest. Then there is the event, where he confirms his believe - in the church, and then there is an afterparty. So how does he explain this network of rituals.. which are somehow connected and referring to each other?

Winner, 3QD Politics and Social Science Prize (Strange Quark)

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About Me

I teach political theory and political science at Victoria University of Wellington. My recent research has focused on the history of political thought, especially ancient Greek and Roman thought. I also have a strong interest in dictatorship, revolution, and other political pathologies. In another life, I would have been a microbiologist or a computer scientist.